As for Campbell’s Soup ensuring that millions of customers will be comfortable purchasing their products, well, that’s just Socialism and creeping Sharia law.

On another note for regular readers of Eric’s blog, he has modestly refrained from informing us that he has taken over Les Scher’s law practice. Don’t believe me? Read the T-S, page A6, it has all the details. Congratulations, Esquire.

This is not a boycott I’m contemplating joining, but to my mind it’s not any loonier than some others I could name. Opposition to Sharia law is perfectly understandable — unless one knows nothing of what Sharia entails.

You’re right. Listen to some of these wacky reasons for killing people. They’re found in Sharia, uh, I mean, uh, the Old Testament. Thank God nobody believes in a literal interpretation of scripture any more.

Exodus 35:2:

Six days shall work be done, but on the seventh day there shall be to you an holy day, a sabbath of rest to the LORD: whosoever doeth work therein shall be put to death.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21:

18If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother, and that, when they have chastened him, will not hearken unto them:

19Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city, and unto the gate of his place;

20And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard.

21And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die: so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear

Leviticus 20:13:

If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

Deuteronomy 22:13-21:

13If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her,

14And give occasions of speech against her, and bring up an evil name upon her, and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid:

15Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate:

16And the damsel’s father shall say unto the elders, I gave my daughter unto this man to wife, and he hateth her;

17And, lo, he hath given occasions of speech against her, saying, I found not thy daughter a maid; and yet these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city.

18And the elders of that city shall take that man and chastise him;

19And they shall amerce him in an hundred shekels of silver, and give them unto the father of the damsel, because he hath brought up an evil name upon a virgin of Israel: and she shall be his wife; he may not put her away all his days.

20But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:

21Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.

Mitch is correct: no one believes in interpreting scripture literally, though some hypocritically claim to. If Mitch is somehow implying that opposition to Sharia is misguided or unimportant, I don’t follow him. — The boycott movement is a risible distraction from a sober look at present-day Muslim behavior.

“But all the young girls who have not known man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves” (Numbers 31: 18). God then explicitly rewards Moses by urging him to distribute the spoils. He does not rebuke Moses or his men (Numbers 31: 25-27).

“If a man happens to meet a virgin who is not pledged to be married and rapes her and they are discovered, he shall pay the girl’s father fifty shekels of silver. He must marry the girl, for he has violated (anah) her. He can never divorce her as long as he lives.” Deuteronomy 22:28-29 NIV

Jon Stewart interviewed Sam Harris on The Daily Show earlier this week. It was possibly the worst interview I’ve ever seen Stewart do, because Sam Harris just isn’t a TV kinda guy. But Harris did make one great point. He said something like this: you’d expect that the supreme moral authority of the universe would at least get the big moral questions right, but Yahweh blew the call on the morality of slavery. Nowhere does the bible suggest that slavery is wrong.

Nor, as you point out, did the bible make the right call on the subject of treating women as property. Makes you wonder.

“Nowhere does the bible suggest that slavery is wrong”? I guess all those black folk who constantly evoked Exodus were deluded, that MLK was mistaken, that the Christian abolition movement was guilty of bad reading. — Yeah, we white guys always know better than those black guys, don’t we! — My gods, the “single vision” of Sam Harris and his acolytes! Doesn’t anyone read William Blake anymore? (He was an unconventional Christian, so we can safely ignore him, I suppose.) Luckily, black folk, Blake, Simone Weil( and many other thinkers )have kept alive the Bible’s capacity to challenge and to inspire. (And : yes, they all read the Good Book selectively, as virtually everyone did until the unfortunate advent of Fundamentalism near the beginning of the 20th century.)

I guess all those black folk who constantly evoked Exodus were deluded, that MLK was mistaken, that the Christian abolition movement was guilty of bad reading. — Yeah, we white guys always know better than those black guys, don’t we!

Southern slave owners certainly thought so, and in terms of the New Testament, they had a point. The OT opposed slavery of Hebrews by Egyptians, but sanctioned plenty of other slavery relationships. MLK of course was speaking to the spirit of the Bible and not the letter in every aspect of it. Slave backing theologists often lamented the black spiritual emphasis on Exodus rather than the NT.

Huh? The only page I can find in which they talk about Scientology seems pretty neutral to me. What makes you think they are connected with Scientology?

FWIW, here’s part of their “statement of beliefs”:

We are a multi-faith group. As of 2010-FEB, we consist of one Atheist, Agnostic, Christian, Wiccan and Zen Buddhist. Thus, the OCRT staff lack agreement on almost all theological matters, such as belief in a supreme being, the nature of God, interpretation of the Bible and other holy texts, whether life after death exists, what form the afterlife may take, etc.

congratulations Erik! and to Les for his retirement. What a great career helping people he has led.

about the halal soup – my understandings are (a) that the requirements for halal are pretty dang close to, and not incompatible with, those for kosher, and that (b) there’s a lot more kosher food produced than there’s strictly a kosher market for, basically because it’s cheap to make small adjustments to mass production in order to reach that market. So, America, say hello to halal: it’s just another indecipherable symbol on that label you can’t read without your glasses anyway.

there’s a great piece in the NYT today about how the first cathedral in America ran into pretty much line-for-line the same crap that is now being hurled at the three blocks from the WTC mosque today. Wondering if there was ever such a freak about kosher as the snit the right wing is concocting today around halal.

what I want to know is does Campbells make non-dairy vegan halal soups? I ain’t buying any of that stuff.

My limited understanding is slavery described in the Hebrew bible wasn’t inherited by birth. It was more akin to indentured servitude which we’ve updated as contracts of employment. Thats a huge difference from antebellum US slavery.

Here is an excerpt from the link I posted. The complete text at the link is short enough that I had thought it would be possible to locate this on one’s own. There are other excerpts that also talk about children of a slave belonging to the slave’s owner. Let’s recall that my point in posting the link was as a response to 4:32’s astonishment that anyone could think the author of the old testament got the moral question of slavery wrong. I don’t really understand why you are trying to sweeten the Old Testament description by saying it was not hereditary. Perhaps you are right, though the text below points out that children could be born into slavery. If you are right, so what?

Exodus 21:1-4: “If thou buy an Hebrew servant, six years he shall serve: and in the seventh he shall go out free for nothing. If he came in by himself, he shall go out by himself: if he were married, then his wife shall go out with him. If his master have given him a wife, and she have born him sons or daughters; the wife and her children shall be her master’s, and he shall go out by himself.”

The point is that biblical slavery is very different from antebellum slavery. Its incorrect to equate the two or infer that antebellum slavery was reasonably justified by the biblical version. In general, IMO, slavery is sometimes referred to as an unquestionable and absolute abomination, similar to how some use Communism as a general epithet. Its simpler but misleading to simply knee-jerk a label and create false associations between social systems.

“…slavery is sometimes referred to as an unquestionable and absolute abomination…”

It was, and is, an absolute abomination, whether we’re talking about the Old Testament type of slavery, the Antebellum American type, or any other type. Different social systems, yes, but the bottom line is the same: People “owning” other people is always wrong.

Thanks, tra. Let’s cut NaN some slack and agree that he is thinking of something closer to indentured servitude.

I think NaN can agree that a system that accepts birth into indentured servitude is not morally justifiable.

Nor is a system that allows a master to select a wife for an indentured servant, and then keep the wife and children of their “marriage” when releasing the husband from his indenture.

Nor is a system that makes unashamed statements like this (also available at the link I’ve now posted twice):

Exodus 21:20-21 “And if a man smite his servant, or his maid, with a rod, and he die under his hand; he shall be surely punished. Notwithstanding, if he continue a day or two, he shall not be punished: for he is his money [property].”

Or this:

Leviticus 25:44-46: “Your male and female slaves are to come from the nations around you; from them you may buy slaves. You may also buy some of the temporary residents living among you and members of their clans born in your country, and they will become your property. You can will them to your children as inherited property and can make them slaves for life, but you must not rule over your fellow Israelites ruthlessly.” (NIV)

Or this:

Leviticus 19:20-22: “And whosoever lieth carnally with a woman, that is a bondmaid, betrothed to an husband, and not at all redeemed, nor freedom given her; she shall be scourged; they shall not be put to death, because she was not free. And he shall bring his trespass offering unto the LORD, unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation, even a ram for a trespass offering. And the priest shall make an atonement for him with the ram of the trespass offering before the LORD for his sin which he hath done: and the sin which he hath done shall be forgiven him.”

Or this:

Deuteronomy 21:10-14: “When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the LORD thy God hath delivered them into thine hands, and thou hast taken them captive, And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to thy wife; Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and her mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her [i.e. rape her or engage in consensual sex], and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. And it shall be, if thou have no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou hast humbled her.”

Or this:

Numbers 31:28-47: “And levy a tribute unto the LORD of the men of war which went out to battle: one soul of five hundred, both of the persons, and of the beeves, and of the asses, and of the sheep: Take it of their half, and give it unto Eleazar the priest, for an heave offering of the LORD.And of the children of Israel’s half, thou shalt take one portion of fifty, of the persons, of the beeves, of the asses, and of the flocks, of all manner of beasts, and give them unto the Levites, which keep the charge of the tabernacle of the LORD.”

Walter Kaufmann, in “The Faith of a Heretic,” makes the point that “Since there is no Hebrew word for ‘slave’ other than ewed, which means ‘servant,’ it is not an easy thing to say whether some form of slavery persisted through most of the time covered by the Old Testament or not….That inhumanity …found frequent expression is obvious, but no other sacred scripture contains books that speak out against social injustice as eloquently, unequivocally, and sensitively as the books of Moses and some of the prophets” (p. 186). — Kaufmann contrasts the Old testament with the Code of Hammurabi on several matters, and the ancient Hebrew text comes out ahead in most cases.( “The Faith of a Heretic”, by the way, is an extended argument for a godless philosophy.)

So (called) reasonable anonymous would be skeptical of Martin Luther King, Jr., who constantly cited Biblical warrant for his civil rights struggle! How comforting to think that there exists a better source of one’s moral philosophy, and that we have it! (Well,somewhere……). How gratifying, being able to look down on King (of all people!). — What a pity most folks are not as enlightened as we are!

10:31 is an example of annoying rhetoric. “tra” is not looking down on King, as I’m sure everyone here realizes.

The human mind is capable of many magnificent things. Among the most magnificent is looking into a text or work of art and extracting meaning from it, often meaning that may not have even been in the consciousness of the original artist. Every artist acknowledges this.

Certainly, the story of the Exodus of “god’s chosen people” from slavery in Egypt is a wonderful work of world literature. It is a problem that it is embedded in a text that also regulates slavery without any apparent disapproval.

People like MLK Jr are able to build inspirational oratory from stories in the bible. They would be equally able to do that from stories in the Koran, the Bhagavad-gita, or any other sacred text. The sacred texts of most religions are a combination of wisdom and what Immanuel Kant called “idols of the tribe.” Part of an education should be enabling a person to read such texts wisely, extracting the wisdom while rejecting the idolatry. MLK Jr did that in a magnificent way — the credit is his, not God’s.

Many modern biblical scholars now believe that there are (at least) four distinct authors of the Old Testament — either individuals or groups — and that helps explain why the text itself contains so much that is internally contradictory.

Mitch’s latest attempt to diss “God” falls short in predictable ways. What would MLK have made of the remark that the “credit is his, not God’s”? I think we all know what his response would have been, and if you find my “rhetoric” annoying, forgive me. — Any sacred text would work as well as the Bible? The history of the planet during the last two or three millennia tells a different story — to me. And I say this as an agnostic.

I wasn’t inclined to bother responding to 10:31’s nonsense. Apparently 10:31 needs to look up the word “crucial” and re-read my comment.

At any rate, my argument is chiefly with those who claim that the Bible is (a) the inerrant Word of God, (b) that therefore it should be taken literally, and (c) that therefore we should base our society, laws, norms, etc., on its contents. In other words, theocratic fundamentalists.

People who just believe (a) and/ or (b) are mostly harmless. People who believe and act on (c) can be dangerous and potentially very harmful.

P.S. As is so often the case, Mitch gets to the heart of the matter, and then as a bonus steers the discussion in an interesting and thought-provoking direction. Thanks, Mitch.

Wow! This will be my last comment — sorry to sound rude, but anyone who writes that Xianity is a relatively small and new religion has received an education too different from mine to allow an intelligent discussion to take place.